Mars

by Ben Bova

  “Yessir. I understand,” said Zieman.

  “That means you will be in charge of the personnel in the dome until Vosnesensky returns.”

  Zieman nodded wordlessly, thinking, If he returns. If.

  SOL 40: MORNING

  Just as he had expected—no, as he had known—there was a stairway cut into the sheer wall of the cliff, leading up to the city built in the giant cleft high above.

  Jamie stood in the brightly warm sunlight of New Mexico even though the sky was a delicate Martian pink. He slid his helmet visor up, knowing he no longer needed his hard suit to protect him. He was coming home, his true home, where two worlds met and blended in the unity and balance that he had unconsciously sought since childhood. For the first time in his life Jamie felt in harmony with the world, with both his worlds, with all the worlds.

  He climbed the stairs slowly, almost unwilling to end the happiness, the peacefulness of this moment. Yet he knew that at the top his people would be waiting to welcome him. Like an ancient priest of the Old Ones climbing the temple stairs in solemn dignity, Jamie moved his booted feet from one stone stair to the next. He saw that the steps had been cut into the living rock long ages ago; their stone surfaces had been worn smooth and saddle-backed by countless generations of climbing feet.

  Piece by piece his protective hard suit disappeared as he climbed. His helmet vanished first, and he could drink in the clean cool air of the true world. Then his boots, the torso shell, the leggings. By the time he reached the top he was naked and possessed nothing except the bear fetish that his grandfather had given him hundreds of millions of kilometers ago.

  Sweat trickled along his flanks, his legs, ran down his face. The air was cool but the sun warmed him, filled him with its life-giving energy.

  He was nearing the top of the stairway. He could hear the breeze sighing, hear fully leafed trees up there calling to him. He looked down at the fetish in his hand and the bear smiled at him. Only a few steps more, my son, said his grandfather’s voice. Only a few steps more.

  Jamie reached the top. The city was there, just as he had known it would be. Magnificent. Straight clean walls of fresh adobe brick. Tier upon tier of houses rising to the top of the cleft where the overhanging rock sheltered them like the protective arm of god.

  “It is good,” Jamie said. “Ya’aa’tey.”

  His grandfather appeared before him, young and strong and naked as Jamie himself. “It is good,” his grandfather said.

  All the people poured out of their homes, thronging into the central plaza where Jamie stood with his grandfather, smiling, singing, carrying wreaths of flowers that they put over Jamie’s head. The women were beautiful, the men strong and handsome.

  Yet Jamie turned to his grandfather. “I can’t stay. The others—they need me.”

  “I know,” said the old man. “Go in beauty, my grandson.”

  Jamie’s eyes snapped open.

  The dream had been so vivid, so real. He dug his hand into the pocket of his coveralls and felt the fetish resting there, a warm comforting lump of stone. Only then did he allow himself to relax in his bunk and take stock of the new day.

  His entire body ached with a dull sullen pain that sapped his strength. His head throbbed, pulse thumping in his ears like a drum slowly beating out the cadence of death. Next to him Connors moaned softly in his troubled sleep, his breath whistling slightly.

  Quietly, Jamie slid out of his bunk. His legs were almost too weak to hold him up. For long minutes he gripped the edge of Joanna’s bunk, uncertain that he could squeeze past the bunks and make it to the lavatory. She was huddled in a fetal position. Ilona lay facedown, unmoving. For a moment Jamie feared she might be dead, but then he saw the slow rhythm of her breathing.

  He pushed past the bunks, grabbing at the hand grips set into the bulkheads to make his way to the lav. In the polished metal mirror above the tiny sink his face stared back at him, gaunt, unshaven, hollow eyed. Slowly, with the deliberate care of a drunk or an old, old man, Jamie washed his face and hands. When he brushed his teeth the brush came away bloody. The teeth even felt loose in his gums. He peeled off his night coveralls and pulled on his day pair. Not much between them, he realized. They were both wrinkled and smelly.

  The others did not begin to awaken until he had mixed himself a glass of instant orange drink and a mug of steaming coffee. They got up slowly, looking as exhausted and pain wracked as Jamie himself felt. Gaunt faces, red eyes, hands trembling, legs almost too weak to hold them up.

  They barely said a dozen words to one another. Mumbles. Grunts. Sighs that turned into gasping, labored breathing.

  Jamie slid past them, the coffee mug in one hand, and forced himself to the cockpit. Sliding into the right-hand seat, he punched up the comm unit and put in a call to the dome.

  Paul Abell’s face appeared on the screen. He was smiling—weakly, but smiling. His cheeks and chin looked freshly shaved, slightly red. His bulging frog’s eyes were clearer than Jamie remembered them.

  “Good morning!” Abell was almost cheerful.

  “How are you?” Jamie’s voice was a scratchy croak.

  “Yang’s vitamin doses seem to be helping,” Abell said brightly. “Got a good night’s sleep. I feel better this morning than I have in days. Not one hundred percent yet, but better.”

  “That’s good.”

  Abell pointedly did not ask how Jamie felt. He could see.

  “Heard from the Russkies yet?”

  “Who?”

  “Mikhail and Ivshenko. They ought to be just about at the canyon’s edge by now.”

  “No. No contact yet.”

  “This morning, for sure,” Abell said.

  “This morning,” Jamie echoed.

  • • •

  “Be careful now,” Vosnesensky muttered. “The horizon is so close that you could become confused.”

  Ivshenko, driving the rover, shot him a dark glance. “Mikhail Andreivitch, I have had as many hours in the simulators and in training exercises as you, have I not? I drove this beast most of the night, did I not? Why do you constantly …”

  “Stop!” Vosnesensky bellowed. Ivshenko tromped his booted foot on the brakes so hard that they would have both pitched into the canopy if Vosnesensky had not insisted that they wear the safety harnesses. Tony Reed, standing behind Vosnesensky’s seat, lunged into the chair back with a painful grunt.

  The Grand Canyon of Mars stretched out in front of them, its rim a bare twenty meters from the rover’s nose. Ivshenko gaped, jaw slack, chest heaving.

  “Good god!” Reed gasped.

  “That is what I was trying to warn you about,” Vosnesensky said calmly. “What appears at first to be the crest of another ridge is actually the edge of the precipice.”

  “You … you should have said so.”

  Vosnesensky chuffed out a weary sigh, like a teacher disappointed with a pupil.

  The canyon was filled with mist, billowing gently in the morning sun, looking almost thick enough to walk on. From inside the cockpit they could not see the bottom of the canyon; it was far too deep for that even if the air had been perfectly clear. To their right and left the cliff walls marched off beyond the horizon, red rock battlements, rugged with untold eons of weathering, tall and proud. Looking straight across the canyon, Vosnesensky thought he could make out the jagged outline of the opposite wall, faint and wavering in the hazy distance. So far away.

  “I don’t see the landslide,” Reed said.

  “Nor do I. We must have drifted off course during the night. I will take a navigational fix. Dmitri Iosifovitch, you contact the base and tell them we have reached the canyon-without falling into it.”

  Ivshenko muttered to himself as he leaned over slightly to reach the comm unit switches. He did not see the slight grin on his commander’s face.

  Within a quarter hour they had pinpointed their location with a fix from one of the navigation satellites deployed around the planet and were on their way to the lip
of the landslide, some five kilometers westward.

  Vosnesensky felt almost relaxed as he rode in the right-hand seat. Ivshenko had driven most of the night, slept a few hours, and now was driving again. He seemed fresh; his reflexes were sharp. Mikhail himself felt little better than he had since the scurvy had hit him; he was still weak, still achy; he had barely slept at all during the night.

  The body affects the mind, he said to himself as they creaked along at twenty kilometers per hour across the boulder-strewn red landscape. When the body hurts, the mind becomes tired, easily confused, quick to despair. I must remember that. I must keep my thinking clear, no matter how my body feels.

  “I think I see it.”

  Ivshenko’s words snapped Vosnesensky out of his musings. He followed the pilot’s pointing finger with his eyes and saw, through the morning haze, what appeared to be a wide semicircle cut into the cliff edge, with a rusty-red pile of dirt slumping down from its rim toward the bottom of the canyon, far below.

  “Yes, that must be it.”

  While Vosnesensky checked the navigational display, Ivshenko said, “You don’t expect to go down that slope, do you?”

  “We have come to rescue the team in the other rover,” Vosnesensky said. The nav screen showed that they were in the right area. The trapped rover was sitting roughly two thirds of the way down the ancient avalanche.

  “Comrade cosmonaut,” Ivshenko said, “what good would it do for us to trap ourselves alongside them?”

  “What do you suggest?” Vosnesensky growled, feeling a sudden impatience with his cohort.

  “I suggest,” Ivshenko put an ironic emphasis on the verb, “that we stop at the lip of the canyon and let them walk to us. That is the safest thing to do.”

  “And if they are too weak to make it?”

  The cosmonaut bit his lip. Vosnesensky waited for his answer, thinking, If he says that we should go back to the dome without going down there and getting them, I’ll throw him out the airlock without a suit.

  “If they are too weak to make it,” Ivshenko said slowly, “then I suppose we will have to go down on foot and help them.”

  “We?”

  “Dr. Reed and myself,” Ivshenko said. “You should remain here in the rover, Mikhail Andreivitch.”

  Vosnesensky felt his heart expand. He broke into a huge grin. “Well spoken, Dmitri Iosifovitch! Brave words! But I can think of something much better.”

  Tony Reed thought, I should hope so. No one’s going to get me to go out there!

  SOL 40: NOON

  Jamie turned the ridged little dial on the binoculars; the rippled expanse of sand swam into sharp focus.

  “It must be an ancient crater that’s been filled in with dust,” he said, as much to himself as the others clustered in the cockpit.

  “Why doesn’t the wind blow the dust away?” Joanna asked.

  He put the glasses down. She was sitting next to him, in the right-hand seat, her face pale, her hair tangled and matted. Her breath stank. Mine does too, Jamie told himself. Everybody’s does.

  Connors, looking more ragged than ever, sat on the floor between the two seats. His coveralls were rumpled and dark with sweat stains. Ilona stood behind him, leaning wearily on the seat backs. She looked bedraggled too; like Joanna, she had not had the strength to brush her hair. Sick and weary as they were, though, they were all eager to catch the first glimpse of Vosnesensky’s rover.

  “I don’t think there’s enough power in the wind to clean out the crater. The air’s too thin, even when it blows at two hundred knots. The crater must have steep walls. Probably made by a meteorite coming in from almost straight overhead.”

  “The wind can gradually fill up the crater with dust,” Joanna surmised, “and once it is full it remains full.”

  “Right,” said Jamie. We’re talking millions of years here, he added silently. Nothing goes quickly on Mars. Come back in a million years and the rover will still be sitting here, most likely.

  He raised the binoculars to his eyes once again. If the oddly rippled sand represented the area of the crater, then it was more than a kilometer across. Jamie could see its boundary clearly, a wide circle where the little wavelets of red sand ended and the ground was more heavily littered with rocks and boulders.

  He remembered arguing with Naguib about the frequency of such dust-filled craters. The Egyptian called them “ghost craters” and believed they peppered the landscape even where the ground looked relatively smooth. Jamie had disagreed. But Abdul was right; we’ve fallen into a ghost crater. I should have noticed the difference in the ground, Jamie berated himself. I should have avoided this area. If only I had been sharp enough …

  “There they are!”

  Joanna pointed eagerly, her wan face suddenly wreathed in a smile.

  Following her extended arm, Jamie saw the rover nosing over the crest of the slope like a fat silver caterpillar with a big gleaming bulbous head inching their way.

  “Greetings, fellow travelers!” Vosnesensky’s voice was harshly rasping in the control panel speaker. To the four of them it sounded like an angel’s sweet melody.

  Jamie glanced down at the comm screen. The cosmonaut looked weak, strained, sweating as he sat at the controls of the second rover and guided it down the slope of the ancient landslide with excruciatingly deliberate, patient care. Tony Reed was hunched behind him, his face drawn, pale, nervous. Both men were in their coveralls.

  Putting the binoculars to his eyes again, Jamie saw a figure in a brilliant red hard suit plodding slowly toward them on foot in front of the rover, poking at the ground in front of him with a long pole the way a blind man gropes along unfamiliar territory, the way a mountaineer feels his way across a snow-choked crevasse.

  Ivshenko trailed a tether from his waist, connected to the nose of the rover, more than twenty meters behind him. The vehicle was inching along, but getting closer every moment. Trust Mikhail to use every safety precaution, Jamie thought. Does he think Ivshenko’s going to float away? For an absurd moment it looked as if the cosmonaut was towing the ponderous rover.

  “They’re coming,” Ilona said in a choked whisper. “They’re coming to save us.”

  “Three cheers for our side,” said Connors weakly.

  Jamie remained in the cockpit and watched their rescuers approaching. More than an hour went by as the rover trundled closer, agonizingly slow, with Ivshenko out front testing the ground. A blind man leading an elephant, Jamie thought.

  “Now be careful,” he said to the cosmonauts. “You see where the ground starts to break up into a series of little sand ripples?”

  Vosnesensky’s image in the display screen nodded its head. Ivshenko said from inside his helmet, “Yes, it is about fifty meters in front of me.”

  “That’s where the crater rim is, I’m pretty sure,” Jamie said. “It’s filled with this very loose sand, more like dust. You’ll have to take the rover around it. Otherwise you’ll get stuck too.”

  Vosnesensky was peering at it suspiciously. “It seems quite wide.”

  “I know. But you can work your way around it, can’t you?”

  “Going down, perhaps. I wonder about going up again.”

  Ivshenko’s voice said, “It might be best to stop the rover at the edge of the loose soil and let me go through the area on foot. Then we can connect a safety line and winch them across to our rover.”

  “Can all four of you get into your hard suits?” Vosnesensky asked.

  “Yes,” said Jamie. “I think so.”

  “I hesitate to risk getting the second rover stuck, too.”

  “I understand. We can get into suits and you can winch us across the soft stuff—if we can set up a line from your vehicle to ours.”

  “Very good. That is what we will do.”

  Dr. Li Chengdu had never in his life felt so hesitant about making a report. This could ruin everything, he knew. It will reflect poorly on my ability as a leader; it will devastate the mission control team. If the
politicians and the media find out about it, it will destroy our chances for further missions to Mars.

  Yet he had to report on the scurvy and the chain of events that had led to it. There was nothing else that Li could do except tell the facts to the men and women who directed the mission. There is no way to cover it up, Li realized. Nor would it be proper to do so. Even to think of a cover-up is criminal. No matter what affect this has on my career or the careers of others.

  Scurvy. Everyone on the ground team nearly killed by scurvy because they had overlooked the fact that pure oxygen had deactivated their crucially needed vitamin C supply. The politicians will jump to the conclusion that the traverse team got stuck in their rover because the scurvy sapped their strength and their judgment. And now Vosnesensky, of all people, is disobeying orders and trying to rescue them.

  Vosnesensky. Wait until the mission controllers sink their teeth into that morsel! What a mess. What a confounded, convoluted, unequivocal disaster.

  Li knew he had to tell the facts to Kaliningrad. Still he hesitated. Pacing his private cubicle in three long-legged strides, back and forth, back and forth, he passed his desktop computer a dozen times without even thinking of starting to file his report.

  Even if I wanted to hide the facts it would be impossible. They will know soon enough that we are not evacuating the dome, as ordered. He agonized for hours. How to put the best face on this disaster. How to tell the news in a way that will not destroy any chance for future missions to Mars. How to admit my own inadequacy without ruining my chances for the future.

  That is the important thing. How to tell this terrible news in a way that will not destroy our chances for the future. That is the vital thing.

  Virtually all of the reports from the ground team were made orally and transcribed into hard copy automatically by the computers in the spacecraft and back at Kaliningrad. Li alone regularly wrote out his reports and transmitted them in written form. But what can I write now? What words can soften this news?